Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so.
It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.
I understand this being default behavior, but there really needs to be a way to disable it.
He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.
I had assumed that Google search had gone downhill because it started trying to "personalize" my search results. That wasn't a great explanation though, as I don't use a Google account.
Hummingbird seems a much more likely explanation.
I do a full clear on my web browser (cookies / offline storage / history, everything) and then open YouTube in a private browsing window and it asks me which of my two Gmail accounts I want to log in with. I'd guess it's just a combo of external IP and browser fingerprint, but it's creepy.
I had no idea about Hummingbird though.
I tend to believe that if user complaints about new problems or regressions increase over statistical noise - there is a problem.
Well said. This is a big problem. We see a similar problem with the use of telemetry data as well.
On the other hand the non-exact hits that it returns push me from time to time in the right direction.
Having said this, I don't know of course if A) I'm too old (40) and the mindset of the younger search-people has now changed and/or B) Google just doesn't index tech forums as much as it used to and/or C) there are just fewer forum-posts and/or D) my problems became more complex (don't think so) and/or etc... .
I tried (and still try from time to time) to use DDG and Bing but without success.
Does anybody else have the same impression?
So ... although I feel like we might be having the same issue, I'm not sure I'm using DDG correctly enough to say it's a problem.
Any search term not wrapped in quotes can be randomly ignored today. It can inject keywords it thinks you want (but really don't). Google is great for searching modern sites like Stack Overflow, but it seems to have lost interest in servicing power users.
I agree.
Could something as innocent as training a new neural net or testing a buggy version of the algorithm on subsets of users. But it could also be as sinister as driving traffic to those in bed with Google, silencing opposition, or effectively whitewashing the entire internet...
It's my opinion that a large portion of the websites on the front page of any search (quora and pinboard anyone) are completely bought and paid for.
They are maximising ad revenue, not the search relevance/usefulness.
Stopped using "google" as a verb a long, long time ago, in favor of just saying "search". I don't think that's ever confused anyone.
I frequently suspect they're starting to optimize more for $ than they were before, and ML just gives them more ways to make that number go up another % or so... but it often comes with impossible-to-predict and wildly inhuman edge cases. It's a pretty common trend when companies start focusing on small number increases - each A/B test shows improvement, but the product as a whole worsens and it drives people away in time.
Maybe some similar change is coming to Search.
To me they started spiraling down when they started to give too much power to designers. Form over content is a terrible idea for a search engine ...
Aspiring science fiction authors, or Neal Stephenson, should write a novel about a world where ML tuned models optimize everything to be just good enough not to churn customers while maximizing margins. (Also applicable to non-profit items like politicians and universities)